


Love in Action

by showgirlsteve



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Gift Exchange, M/M, Tumblr Prompt, domestic stucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 07:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3126500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/showgirlsteve/pseuds/showgirlsteve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve just wants to give Bucky some nice holiday memories. It isn't really working out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in Action

**Author's Note:**

> "Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas." - Dale Evans
> 
> My (rather late) Christmas present for [brucebenner](http://celeborn.co.vu/) over on tumblr, as part of the Marvel Gift Exchange.

 

The first Christmas after the fall of SHIELD, Steve spent alone. He was cold, and far from home, and on the precipice of giving up chasing Bucky in favor of burning the remnants of Hydra to the ground himself. Natasha had her own missions, and Sam his own family, and so Steve was left on Christmas Day to track down what was left of his.

By the second Christmas, Bucky had come home. As December rolled in, both Steve and Bucky found themselves residing in Stark Tower. And Steve was determined to make it as memorable a Christmas as possible. Maybe Bucky was still recovering, maybe Steve was still a little bit lost, but they were together this year. Everything would be _perfect._

“Ain’t it a little bit early for this, Steve?”

Steve glanced up at Bucky from where he sat on the floor beneath a tangle of Christmas lights. Carols drifted softly from a speaker in the corner of the room. “If anything, we’re late. Christmas starts early now. It’s a fake tree; don’t have to worry about it dying on us before Christmas day.” Steve would have loved to have gotten a real tree, but it just wasn’t practical. Even if he wasn’t called away on an emergency with nobody to water the thing, there was no predicting how Bucky would react to it on one of his bad days. A glittery decoration was one thing, but bringing the scent of a wintery forest into their home was too much of a potential trigger for Steve to ignore.

He shoved a tin of popcorn towards Bucky with his foot. “String these.”

Bucky opened his mouth to argue, but snapped it closed. A huff of air escaped as he slid shopping bags out of the way to sit down on the floor next to Steve. He held out his hand for string and needle, and Steve handed him a plastic container full of cranberries. One eyebrow crawled towards his hairline as he accepted.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Steve. “Popcorn by itself makes a pretty boring garland.” Lights sorted out, he began unpacking glass ornaments from an assortment of cardboard boxes. “I had JARVIS help me order these. Might have gone a bit overboard, but I wasn’t sure what would look good.” Bucky busied himself with tying a needle to the end of the string he’d been given.

After a few minutes of working in companionable silence, Bucky felt Steve’s eyes on him once again. He looked up held eye contact until Steve broke.

“It’s just. You’re doing it – here, let me see.” He took the garland back from Bucky and began stringing them until a more thought-out pattern than Bucky’s random order appeared. “Like that. Here.”

Bucky didn’t accept the string this time. “Thought the whole point of homemade decorations was, they aren’t perfect.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t look nice. It’s not like it’s any harder to do it that way.” The corner of his mouth curled the way it always had when he was ready for a fight, until Bucky stood up. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“You do it, then.”

“You can’t just leave, Bucky. The whole point is we’re supposed to do stuff together.”

“The point? I come in here and you’re in the middle of a pile of Christmas decorations and you rope me into helping, how is that doing stuff together?”

“Well, I mean, I meant for us to decorate together. But everything came today, and I…you’re here now. Help me with this.”

“No way. If I’m doing anything, it’s unpacking the rest of that mess, you’re making it worse.”

“I am not! There are a lot of them, it can only be so organized.”

“It can be a lot more organized than that, punk. Budge over. We don’t need you to break any more of these things, anyway.”

If Steve stabbed his needle through the popcorn a bit harder than was strictly necessary, well, Bucky was done talking for right now, and there was nobody else there to say anything about it.

* * *

 

After Steve moved a third ornament that had been originally placed by Bucky, he stalked off for real.

Steve hung half a dozen more ornaments before he noticed Bucky was gone.

* * *

 

Later, when Bucky found himself in the kitchen of their apartment, he discovered that in addition to what seemed to Bucky to be enough decorations to supply half the tower, Steve had purchased all the necessities for baking.

There was even a pile of cookbooks on the kitchen counter, all of them with cookie recipes helpfully bookmarked by cheerful post-it notes.

 _This_ , Bucky thought to himself, _is something I can handle._

His first batch of cookie dough was nearly ready to go in the oven when Steve appeared and professed his desire to help. Bucky reluctantly assigned him the task of measuring dry ingredients for the next batch.

“Steve. No.”

Steve froze with his measuring cup about to pour. “It says two cups.”

Bucky groaned. “Please tell me that isn’t the second cup, Steve.”

“What’s wrong with this cup?” He sat the measuring cup back on the table and frowned at it.

“You can’t just scoop it out and throw it in the bowl. You gotta level it off first. Or your measurements will be all off.”

“That’s barely a difference, Buck, you’re just being picky.”

“Yeah, picky is the difference between decent cookies and good ones. You’re the one that wants Christmas cookies, let me do it right.”

“If I’m doing it so wrong, why don’t you just do it, then?”

“Well I was _trying_ to, before someone came in here with his puppy dog eyes and asked to help!”

“Fine, I’ll leave you to it then!”

“Fine by me, pal!” (If Bucky mixed the next batch of dough with a little more force than was strictly necessary, well, Steve had left the kitchen and there was nobody else to say anything.)

* * *

 

It wasn’t just the apartment that had a metric ton of decorations, Bucky realized the next morning. It was the food, too. The entire table was _covered_ in food coloring, icing, and sprinkles of all shapes and sizes. There were large containers of gumdrops, licorice, and M &Ms to round out the sugary extravagance.

“Hey,” said Steve with an apologetic smile.

“Hey.”

“So, I thought we could decorate those cookies together? Maybe?”

“Yeah. We could do that.”

Steve’s cookies were – well, they were perfect.

Bucky’s – well, they weren’t.

“They just aren’t very Christmas-y, Bucky, that’s all I’m saying.”

“If you don’t like ‘em, just say so. Why’d you even buy those colors if I’m not supposed to use ‘em, huh?”

Steve made a strangled noise and gestured to his Avengers gingerbread family. The likenesses were impressive.  

Bucky set down the sugar cookie snowflake he’d been giving black icing stripes. “Uh-huh. You know what? This seems like more your thing than mine anyway.” He pushed his chair away from the table. Steve made the noise again.

“Hey, don’t –“

“Just let me know when you’re done, alright? I’ll help you clean up, I made more of a mess than you did.”

Steve did not get Bucky to help him clean the kitchen. He iced a few more cookies in a fit of stubbornness, and then put everything away himself. Bucky had retreated to elsewhere in the apartment, so Steve threw himself onto the couch, staring at the Christmas tree. Another failure. He was running out of ideas, and no closer to giving Bucky a nice holiday memory of the two of them together.

He must have fallen asleep at some point, because he woke up to the smell of chocolate under his nose.

“Bucky?”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I, uh, I made this for you.” He pushed the mug of hot chocolate to Steve before the other man had finished sitting up.

“Thanks.”

“I asked Sam, and,” Bucky gestured to the DVD case sitting on the end table next to a tray of Bucky’s snickerdoodles. “Some Christmas movie. He said it’s a classic.” He grabbed the remote and sat next to Steve, retrieving a fleece blanket from somewhere near his feet. He started the movie and offered one end of the blanket to Steve.

Steve pulled the blanket around both of them and leaned his head against Bucky’s shoulder with a smile as the movie started.

**Author's Note:**

> My giftee for the Marvel Gift Exchange on tumblr requested domestic Stucky. I promised cute home-for-the-holidays fic before remembering that I'm better at angst than fluff, so I wrote a fic where the boys spend most of their time arguing. Oops?
> 
> This is super late because I was in the hospital over the holidays, thank to my giftee for their patience. Not beta read, and I'm on about a dozen different medications right now, so there may well be mistakes. Sorry.
> 
>  
> 
> [Visit me on tumblr!](http://showgirlsteve.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Kudos are great, I love you forever for comments.


End file.
